The story:
I opened up my laptop, typed my password in, and it said it was wrong (strange, because I was sure I got it right). I typed it in again-- same response. I was going to try another time but despite a blinking cursor, I could not type anything, even with clicking on the box. Frustrated, I did a hard shutdown: holding down the power until pewwww shut down. I started it back up and it had the wrong lock screen. I logged in and lots of custom settings were gone: my taskbar settings, the icon theme, the color of the folders... I'm not sure what else, if anything. Somehow, the lock screen seems to have recovered, but I want to ask if there's any switch that got changed that I can change back before I go and (painstakingly) re-customize everything.

Thanks in advance. I found a similar problem in the forum, but it was unresolved.